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​Your goal as a game company is to keep your players playing the game and happy. Your players are valuable, so you strive to keep your gameplay interesting, challenging, and engaging for them.

Sounds pretty straightforward, but it’s harder than it sounds when you think about how often you deploy game patches and updates, especially for free-to-play and subscription-based games.

Why your game patching/updating software mattersWhen the time comes to add new levels, new features, or to make other improvements to your game, you have to deploy an update. This is where friction can creep into your carefully crafted world and unleash havoc.

When your players are engaged, they make time to play your game. They even look forward to the updates with new game content. But the anticipation and excitement of playing quickly becomes a buzzkill when there’s a new update because the time that was set aside to play will instead be spent updating or patching. Suddenly, that excitement turns into frustration.

When your players are not engaged, they are not always lost. It is often an update that brings them back. But when that happens, depending on how long they have been gone, patching up to the latest version can itself be tricky and time consuming.

So, how do you make the best of both situations?Engaged players want new content, with minimal interruptions to game play. Re-engaging players who could be waiting for that one feature, level or new character may come back, but they’ll mostly likely have a long update path ahead of them?

The answer lies within the game patching solution. The goal for any game patching solution should be to have players spend more time playing and less time patching/updating. With the right game patching solution, you can give your players more time to play.

In addition, your team needs an easy-to-use patch management interface that makes preparing and releasing those game updates and patches a breeze.

Since frequent updates are essential for free-to-play and subscription games, making your updating process as seamless and frictionless as possible is vital for your team and for your players.